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As temperatures climb, the Langwater Crew loads into trucks by 7:00 a.m. for the daily harvest. 3×5 notecards with scrawled harvest numbers are tucked into the pockets of our work pants. Glove boxes are stuffed with rubber bands. Truck beds are filled with empty crates and sleepy harvesters. Folks on the crew are known for their proficiency with certain crops. Max, who later in the season will spend countless hours picking perfectly ripe red tomatoes, spends his early summer mornings in the strawberry field filling tray after tray of deep crimson berries. Newcomers to the Langwater Crew spend their first weeks being trained on the surprisingly elusive art of bunching. Bunching radishes. Bunching beets. Bunching hakurei turnips. Bunching so that each bunch is nearly identical. Bunching with ever increasing speed.

Tender greens benefit from cooler morning temperatures and so we devote the early hours to Lettuce, Arugula, Mustard, Kale… Kale is a crew favorite. Right now, kale plants are lush and full, making for quick picking. Unlike those pesky roots that must be arranged just so, a kale bunch comes easier to most novice harvesters. Every 10- 15- 20 bunches, I pause to collect our bunches into crates. By 8:00 a.m. our first truck stacked tall with curly, lacinato, red Russian and all of kale’s cousins is ambling down the farm road for a dip in cool tubs of water before they make their way to you. Periodically throughout the morning, trucks follow the path of the first with herbs, roots and berries until we’ve harvested all of your food for the day. The vegetables are off to our farmstand, markets and restaurants. We are off to our afternoon weeding projects…

The glorious days of spring are here! As the temperatures continue to rise and days lengthen we’re hitting the ground running at Langwater Farm. While we’ve been busily seeding in the greenhouse and repairing machinery since February, these days the Langwater crew is out in the field. Lovelock lettuce, Lacinato kale, Napa cabbage and Bright Lights chard are among the cool-weather seedlings that have found their footing in the newly prepared fields over the past week. Many vegetables are seeded directly into the cool soils. We’re watching for our spring carrots, beets and radish to pop up in the coming days. Deliciously fancy fava beans are also rejoining our repertoire this spring. Passing by the farm, you’ll see long, white swaths of fabric in the fields. This row cover adds an extra layer of warmth, giving our spring greens a boost of growth.

Spring is also primetime for infrastruture projects around the farm. This season, we’re tackling barn renovations at the Wheaton Farm and fencing around the post office field to protect our strawberries, greens, and carrots from nibbling deer. We’re assembling a high tunnel (unheated greenhouse) at our home base near the farmstand. The moment this tunnel is sheathed in plastic later this week, we’ll fill it up with onion and tomato seedlings that are eager for more space.

With muddy rubber boots and a hopeful spring outlook, we can’t wait to welcome you back to the farm for opening day on Saturday, May 2nd. Until then!

-Liz Nolan
“Why is the shovel regarded as a symbol of drudgery? Perhaps because most shovels are dull. Certainly all drudges have dull shovels, but I am uncertain which of these two facts is cause and which effect. I only know that a good file, vigorously wielded, makes my shovel sing as it slices the mellow loam.”

-Aldo Leopold, from “A Sand County Almanac”

As always we follow the whims of the season. November brought hard frosts, and we raced old man winter to bring in our storage crops. Last Wednesday we harvested the rest of the beet crop at Wheaton in the rain and sleet. We’ve harvested all but one bed of our storage carrots, making quick work of it with the under cutter implement on the tractor. Now that our storage crops are nearly all safely tucked in for the months ahead we can breathe a sigh of relief. Yet the harvest continues. Our fields are still flush with winter hardy kales, the most burly of leeks for winter harvest, and baby greens. We are able to extend the harvest for the kale and some greens by diligently applying a row cover on the coldest of nights. The row cover is like a big blanket. We cover up the greens and tack down the sides with generous spoonfuls of soil. We remove the covers frequently for harvest and to prevent excessive humidity. The on and off of the cover is a big task and the greedy wind often attempts to wrestle the cover from us- but we are not fazed. We have sharp shovels and great recipes for kale.

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Langwater Farm Testimonials

"We have been members of the Langwater Farm CSA since it first began. We participate in the regular CSA and the winter and sunflower CSA's. We love the idea of local organic food from May through December. We really enjoyed our first year and would say that it has only gotten better. There is always someone at the farm stand to greet you with a smile and plenty of knowledge about the produce. They offer a wide variety of high quality vegetables and fruits. We also enjoy the convenience of picking up our share at an amazing farm stand so that purchasing extra goodies is an option - organic seedlings in the spring, an extra watermelon in the summer, etc. We look forward to many more seasons at Langwater Farm!" -Heather and Chris Buder